


ars amatoria

by amurderof



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Future Fic, Handfasting, M/M, Marriage Proposal, No Spoilers, Schmoop, Vitaar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 14:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3854521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amurderof/pseuds/amurderof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not so much a fully-formed plan as a want, when the idea first comes to Dorian.</p><p>The Iron Bull returns to Skyhold, axe slung over his shoulder while he swaggers into the courtyard as though he's some great conquering warrior, vitaar painted across his chest and shoulders and back in intricate patterns.</p><p>Dorian greets him before he can run off to do anything other than take a much-needed shower, the lug, and he lays his palm flat over Bull's stomach because the rest of him's covered in bloody poisonous paint. Bull grins down at him, and Dorian knows later that they speak to each other, but all he remembers is the thought that eclipsed all others — how he’d wanted Bull to take him in his arms then, and how bloody awful it would’ve been to be poisoned because of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ars amatoria

**Author's Note:**

> Soo [alphabetiful](http://alphabetiful.tumblr.com) drew [this ABSOLUTELY FRIGGING GORGEOUS art](http://alphabetiful.tumblr.com/post/117617914989/look-at-this-profile-isnt-it-incredible-i) of Dorian in gold and vitaar and I lost my mind and rambled at them and a hundred other Thirst Squad darlings on twitter and this happened. What a good. Bless you and yours, Thirst Squad. ♥
> 
> And finally, a thank you to my glorious beta [fiveyearmission](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyearmission), who even looked over this silly bit of fluff.

It's not so much a fully-formed plan as a _want_ , when the idea first comes to Dorian.

The Iron Bull returns to Skyhold, axe slung over his shoulder while he swaggers into the courtyard as though he's some great conquering warrior, vitaar painted across his chest and shoulders and back in intricate patterns.

Dorian greets him before he can run off to do anything other than take a much-needed shower, the lug, and he lays his palm flat over Bull's stomach because the rest of him's covered in bloody poisonous paint. Bull grins down at him, and Dorian knows later that they speak to each other, but all he remembers is the thought that eclipsed all others — how he’d wanted Bull to take him in his arms then, and how bloody awful it would’ve been to be poisoned because of it.

 

==

 

It’s simple enough to manage on his own, in the beginning. He pilfers a small sample of Bull’s favored black vitaar — and he has always found it surprising, knowing Bull’s love of the garish, that he restricts himself to such an inoffensive color — and keeps it in a small jar on his dressing table. The vitaar can last for days even in large swaths once applied, Dorian’s seen Bull wear it often enough, but Dorian knows he should start small, like dipping one’s toe into a lake to test the temperature before committing.

He devotes one of his rattier brushes to the cause, painting a tiny dot of the vitaar on the inside of his left wrist, under one of his leather bands. It will stay hidden that way, and if his skin responds any more poorly than expected, at least the rash will remain equally covered.

He feels fatigued for most of the day, and by dinner the sight of food turns his stomach, but if this _works_ , surely mild discomfort will be worth it.

“You’re looking a bit peaky,” Krem observes later, sitting across from Dorian in the tavern. Bull’s at the bar getting refills, so Dorian doesn’t immediately bat away Krem’s concern.

“I’m experimenting,” he says opaquely, and Krem frowns until Dorian lifts his arm, quickly unwrapping the band around his wrist. Krem’s eyes widen and his mouth falls open, and Dorian nods once, sharply, before putting the band back to right.

“I trust your discretion,” he says with a quick smile, and Krem’s still shaking his head when Bull returns with their drinks.

 

==

 

Krem’s knowledge of Dorian’s little test is of significant help as the weeks go by.

When they’re out in the Hidden Wastes, all of them together, and Bull wonders where the fuck his vitaar’s going, Krem doesn’t even meet Dorian’s eye when he tells his chief he’s probably just getting old.

“I had a whole… fucking jar…” Bull says bemusedly, and chucks a handful of sand at Krem’s back when Krem’s not looking.

Under Dorian’s wristband there’s a set of painted lines, and while he can overtire easily, especially under the bloody western Orlesian sun, he’s not _dead._ Which means it’s working.

 

==

 

“Oh, let me help you,” Dorian says with a sigh, moving to stand behind Bull while Bull carefully applies paint to his chest. He has a brush and several small carved stamps made of some sort of hard wood — Dorian had passed them between his hands once, while Bull let out increasingly concerned noises... over Dorian’s safety with the vitaar or for the safety of the stamps, he’s not sure.

Bull leans forward, closer to the mirror Dorian brings for himself but Bull always ends up using. “It’s not safe. Vitaar seeps into the wood, you touch it and it could kill you.”

 _It wouldn’t_ , Dorian thinks, _my fingers barely tingle when I pick up my own brush now_. But Bull’s not to know, not yet, and so Dorian presses his hands flat to Bull’s unpainted shoulders, and kisses the crown of Bull’s skull, between his horns. Bull grumbles something about vints and low self-preservation, and Dorian cannot _wait_ to show him. In time. Not soon enough.

 

==

 

He overdoes it eventually, his impatience getting the better of him.

It stands to reason, he supposes, the _fool_ that he is, that after a certain point one must simply be _immune_ , and any additional vitaar wouldn’t matter. Not that he thinks he’s immune, not yet, but it’s been months now: he rarely feels ill from the lines around his wrist, and his skin rarely reddens. He’s not yet sure he can reach out to Bull during battle, drag fingers across his chest, touch him when he’s sweaty and intimidating and glorious — but surely he’s made great progress.

Dorian switches arms, painting his right forearm awkwardly with his left hand clasped around the ratty brush, because it will be covered by his robe and he has more room to expand. He paints broad stripes from wrist to elbow, and cleans the brush while he waits for it to dry.

It hits him in mere moments, a sudden twisting in his gut, a pounding thud of pain at the base of his skull, and he knows with a damning surety that this is it. The brush clatters to the dressing table and he staggers back and collapses into the chair. He’s going to die because he decided it’d be a wonderful idea to paint himself with fucking qunari poison.

His heart beating percussively in his chest, he forces himself back to his feet. No. He’s not going to do anything as simplistic as poison himself to death. This is not how Dorian Pavus dies — there are far too few weeping admirers clutching each other while he slips into the great beyond.

He makes it to the window overlooking the courtyard, and luck would have it that below Krem and the others are doing their damndest to brain each other. He’s too high up for them to hear him, he’s not sure he could _shout_ , but he sends a burst of flame into the air before slumping onto the floor.

He wakes to a firm hand against his cheek, a _slap_ of sorts, the _nerve_ , though when he sits up he immediately pitches to the side and vomits out whatever he consumed the night before. The day…? Fuck. It’s dark outside, and the hand brushing hair away from his face as he tries to catch his breath, hanging over the edge of his bed, is small and pale — Dalish.

Dalish hands him a cloth to wipe his mouth — how tempting it is, to drag it across his tongue as well — and she aids him when he struggles to lie back on the bed.

“How…?”

Krem, Stitches, and Skinner are standing around the bed. Dalish is sitting on the edge next to him, and she reaches across to push his hair out of his eyes. He can _feel_ himself sweating.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Skinner says pointedly. Ah, she’s likely the one who slapped him awake. He and Krem have engaged in fistcuffs but only Skinner would take advantage of a dying man.

Krem rolls his eyes but doesn’t tell her she’s wrong. It may be the near brush with death, but Dorian can’t find it in himself to protest her observation either. “I’d simply thought…”

“There’s safer ways to do this,” Stitches interrupts, and Dorian’s already thinking of the reasons why this whole process is his choice to make and none of them are going to convince him otherwise when he realizes Stitches didn’t tell him to stop.

“I’m… sorry?”

Dalish laughs at him and tugs his earlobe. “You really doing this, Hothouse?”

He imagines batting her hand away but finds he doesn’t have the wherewithal to make it happen; instead he closes his eyes and lets out a long, low groan. “I’m really doing this.”

“Right,” Krem says decidedly, and Dorian lets himself drift back to sleep to the sound of his boys working it out.

 

==

 

It’s a more complicated process from that point forward. Stitches sets to experimenting, taking half of Dorian’s collected vitaar to test varying formulas, mixing the paint with embrium, with elfroot, with deathroot on one interesting hallucination-inducing occasion.

“Did you know, some Tevinter scholars have proposed the theory the Qunari mix vitaar with their own blood,” Dorian observes offhandedly one day, when Stitches is finishing his most recent batch — an herb imported from Rivain, apparently, that Stitches mumbles the name of every time Dorian asks. It’s rather a good thing Dorian trusts him, honestly.

Stitches pauses in stirring and glances up at Dorian, eyes widening. “We could try that.” Just like that, as though some bizarre Qunari blood magic ritual is a reasonable thing to attempt.

“Absolutely _not_ ,” Dorian snaps, and Stitches shrugs and goes back to stirring.

Dalish insists that they try magic, because that’s what vitaar is, _somehow_. “The chief would never admit it, but how else does it harden like that?” She knocks her knuckles against Dorian’s shoulder, bare now because Dalish wants to see something.

“Yes, I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear he’s been slathering himself up with magic—.” He frowns at her when she wiggles her eyebrows at him, the innuendo unsaid but _apparently_ obvious, and continues with an aggrieved sigh, “For his entire life, I was going to say, you ridiculous woman.”

“Mm _hmm_ ,” she hums, and sets her hand against his shoulder. “Let me know if this hurts.”

Krem employs his skills in subterfuge to keep Bull in the dark regarding his vanishing vitaar supplies. Dorian feels very nearly guilty about that, about pulling the wool over Bull’s eyes, though at the same time he has a hard time believing Bull doesn’t have an _inkling_ of what’s going on. Krem has an ever-expanding list of excuses he draws from when Bull asks what the fuck’s going on — on one memorable occasion Bull’s jar of vitaar breaks en route to their latest mission destination, spilling over everything in his pack. Bull spends hours carefully cleaning his possessions while Dorian’s fingers _itch_ with the desire to help him, he _could_ , he almost certainly could handle it, but then Bull would know and the ruse would be over.

At least Krem’s able to tell Bull “maybe you _broke_ it” for three months after.

Rocky is brought in on the loop when Stitches concocts what appears to be a particularly volatile variation on the vitaar that Dorian’s wary of getting near his person. It _smokes_ when Stitches first mixes it; Dorian _refuses_ , and as a means of ameliorating him Stitches has Rocky run his own tests to prove its safety.

Rocky loses an eyebrow, Dorian glares at Stitches for several long minutes, and then Rocky rushes off to his room to consult his “most recent work on replicating that damned gaatlok”.

Skinner by and large leaves them all to it, though she infrequently accompanies Dalish to sit to the side of them and look bored.

“How quickly does it harden?” she asks one evening, after the vitaar is long-since dry and Dalish and Dorian are completing the notes on how he felt when he painted over the barrier spell they both set up around him.

“It was hard half an hour ago,” Dalish says distractedly, hunching further over the notebook. The chair Skinner sits on screeches against the floor behind them, and Dorian’s halfway to asking if she needs something when he feels something _thwap_ soundly against his painted shoulder.

“ _Huh_ ,” Skinner says, and Dorian turns his head enough to watch her jab her dagger into his shoulder again —  and then they trade increasingly hostile barbs (that start with “What if it hadn’t _worked_?” and “Then it needed to be _tested_ and I was _helping_!”) until Dalish shepherds Skinner out of Dorian’s bedroom.

Grim finds out because Dorian honestly forgets he didn’t already know and brings it up one evening while they’re settling around their campfire, Bull off filling the cast iron pot with water from the river.

“Y’fuckers,” he says gruffly — Dorian can count on two hands the number of times he’s heard Grim speak — and Dalish chucks a pinecone at his head.

 

==

 

“Y’ever seen a sunset like that?”

Dorian notes his page and closes his book — Varric’s latest, absolutely abysmal, but Cassandra stood over him until he’d read the first three chapters and now he needs to know how it _ends_ — and glances over at Bull, reclined as he is out on the grass, propping himself up on his elbows. Dorian rests the book on his crossed knees, thinks idly of the vitaar he’s got painted in loops around his kneecaps, and looks from Bull to the sunset, which is indeed spectacular.

“Probably,” Dorian says, and Bull chuckles low. “Though it’s unlikely I took the time to appreciate it.”

“Mm, so I’m good for you,” Bull says, his voice content and certain in a way that has only come to him over the years, to the both of them. Hard fought and hard won, that certainty. It pools warm in Dorian’s chest, and spreads through his limbs until he feels heavy and full and beloved.

He can’t bring himself to roll his eyes, even out of habit, and he moves into Bull’s embrace when Bull wraps his arm around Dorian’s hips. “I suppose you are.”

Bull’s corresponding smile is more brilliant than any sunset — oh _Maker_ , Dorian needs to finish Varric’s damned book so he can rise above such metaphors again — and then Bull shifts beside him, jostling him as he removes his arm from his hips. Bull gets on his knees, sitting back on his feet, and his hands raise and then drop between them in a bewilderingly awkward gesture. Dorian narrows his eyes and looks about them, immediately suspicious — if he and their boys have been planning things, perhaps _Bull_ and their boys have been doing the same.

“So I asked Krem a load of questions but I probably still got a lot wrong,” Bull says, ducking his head, confirming _something_ for Dorian, but _what_ , and then Bull fishes something small out of his pocket and holds it up and Dorian can’t focus beyond the white hot noise roaring between his ears.

It was obvious to Dorian from a young age what his future entailed. He would be wed to an esteemed woman and they would beget several necessary offspring, and then like his father and so many before him he would find actual enjoyment in life elsewhere. He never met his father’s mistress but he knew she existed and that she, ostensibly, made his father happy.

In time Dorian managed to fuck everything up of course, but he still held that straightforward view from his childhood: marriage was about status, power, and children. There was no point to it, besides.

“Where did you get that?” Not the best response, but they’re the first words Dorian can force his mouth and tongue to form. His hands twitch at his sides, and he can’t be sure if he wants to grab the ring or bat it out of Bull’s grasp.

“It’s not… difficult, to find a ring,” Bull responds, and already he looks concerned, as though he’s planning contingencies for every which way Dorian may react and.

And Dorian slumps back onto the grass, reaching up and covering his face with his hands. His shoulders start to shake, the whole of him starts to shake, and it’s a genuine surprise to him when he realizes it’s laughter and that he isn’t set to start sobbing, out in this wilderness after Bull has proposed to him, of all things.

“You ridiculous man,” Dorian says against his palms.

Bull huffs from somewhere above him, and when Dorian lowers his hands from his face Bull’s hovering over him, looking less wary, very nearly back to the certainty of before.

“You ridiculous man,” Dorian repeats, and he grabs Bull by the horns and pulls him down to kiss.

 

==

 

It’s the perfect opportunity. Dorian knows this intellectually, and Dalish says as much when she insists she accompany him to Val Royeaux to consider attire for the handfasting. (Bull expressed his reasonable discomfort with an Andrastian ceremony, and Dorian doesn’t have it in him to deny Bull when he asks for things outright.)

“What is?” Vivienne asks archly, looking between the two of them while they sit in her parlor eating a collection of items that one may consider food if one were comfortable with ingesting Orlesian delicacies in the first place. (Dorian is not and so does not. Vivienne had suggested a caterer she knew for the handfasting, and Dorian has already lost the man’s contact information.)

"I've taken it upon myself to become acclimated to vitaar," Dorian explains, and drinks some of the admittedly fine wine Vivienne has had brought out for them.

Dalish snickers. “It sounds so well-thought-out when you say it like that. He nearly offed himself by overdoing it.”

Dorian rolls his eyes. “That was some time ago. I’ve become much more circumspect since.”

“Old man,” Dalish says affectionately. “And chief still doesn’t know.”

“Then you _must_ make use of it for the ceremony.” Vivienne steeples her hands together on her lap, and Dorian sees a plan forming in her head. Good. He trusts her taste in fashion infinitely more than her taste in food.

 

==

 

It was a foolish idea from the start. A foolish idea, one plagued by nausea and fevers and near death, made even worse by this blasted _marriage_ , which he has been fastidiously not thinking of in terms beyond the ceremony itself. Two persons who care for and, yes, love each other come together publicly as a statement about their relationship, as proof of their commitment to one another. Dorian assumes. That's what Josephine insists anyway, but then Josephine and Adaar have been embarassingly in love for ages now and were married as soon as the world was put to right. The Montilyets found Adaar quite an acceptable match for their daughter besides.

Not that that matters.

Varric’s nonsense books always have this bit — one of the lovers feeling nervous before the momentous wedding, second-guessing their decisions. Of all of the absurd things to be accurate, Dorian’s miserably hateful this one's it.

Krem's seeing to Bull, whatever that means, and Dorian has not a single inkling what the two of them will think is appropriate attire for today. He himself is genuinely torn over whether or not he wants Bull to wear a shirt for once in his life.

Vivienne lent her connections in Val Royeaux to Dorian's own attire, but while he stands before the mirror with Dalish fluttering around him, he's not sure of their choices.

"You're freaking out," Dalish says as she hands him the stretch of red silk to wrap around his waist, a purely decorative piece seeing as the white trousers hold themselves up through sheer bloody _tightness_.

"I'm doing no such thing," Dorian replies immediately, and Dalish snorts under her breath — though is kind enough to not call him a liar vocally.

"We should get started on the paint, or it's not gonna be dry by the time chief'll want to trip you into bed." She smiles at him when he glares at her, and he wonders how of all the people available to him he's found a good friend in a woman who still insists publicly she uses a bow to fight.

She is right, though — that the paint needs some time to dry — and he passes her one of the carved wooden stamps he pilfered from Bull's collection last night, the handle wrapped in a length of leather so she doesn’t fall ill from assisting him. It’s slow work, even between the both of them, and what should be comfortable silence turns into increasingly impractical thoughts on Dorian’s part:

He’s become immune to a poisonous substance for no reason other than to increase the amount of time he can touch a qunari. A qunari he is willingly binding himself to, publicly — which isn’t even a concern, if he presses himself on it, and isn’t that another thing, _still_ , years later yes but…!

“You _are_ freaking yourself out,” Dalish says again, and she pokes Dorian at the base of his skull with her nail. He bats her hand away, but doesn’t protest the observation. “I figured you would. Skinner should be here soon.”

“Absolutely _not_ ,” Dorian snaps, nearly ruining the broad line he’s currently circling around his shoulder. “I’ve no need for her particular brand of motivation.”

Dalish hums to herself, and jabs Dorian with her nail until he resettles so she can resume stamping the closely-spaced diamonds along his shoulder blades.

Skinner eventually does find them, and Dorian notes distractedly that she has her own jars in her hands — when he truly processes this, he nearly drops his brush, and jerks around quickly enough that Dalish curses at him.

“We made this special,” Skinner says sharply, and passes one of the jars to Dalish. “Adaar gave her opinion too.”

“While I trust the Inquisitor with my life, I’m not sure I feel the same about her opinion on… what _is_ that?” Dorian catches a flash of red when Skinner removes the lid on her jar.

“Right proper vitaar,” Dalish says, and Dorian notices her own jar is full of white paint. “We thought you’d like to feel extra pretty.”

“ _Dalish_ ,” Dorian starts, and Skinner steps in close, wielding the brush in her hand as though it were a blade.

“Shut the fuck up and let us paint your face, Hothouse,” she says, and Dorian only notices once there’s red splashed across his collar and cheekbones, lined with white, that between the two of them he completely forgot to be anxious.

 

==

 

Something Varric’s trash gets exquisitely incorrect is the idea that one is so swept up in the proceedings once they’ve begun that they lose track of events, remembering nothing until they’re facing their beloved next to the altar or the ship’s prow or the bale of hay. Dorian remembers every detail from the point he leaves Dalish and Skinner to bicker over how to clean their brushes, to meeting Vivienne on his way to the garden and the curl of her smile when she tells him he looks _garish_ , to the long wait standing next to Cullen under the garden trellis while Cullen asks increasingly desperate questions about how Dorian’s not _dead_.

Adaar’s never mentioned that once the vitaar has dried on your face your skin tugs tight when you smile.

Krem comes bounding into the garden after some time, shaking his head and waving a hand at Dorian, mouthing something Dorian only catches a handful of words from (“sorry”, “finicky bastard”, “overdramatic”). A few paces behind him comes the Iron Bull, and Dorian will remember this moment most of all: Bull dressed in heavy black damask lined with gold, trousers and fitted vest, gold looped around his arms, his horns. He looks absurd. Dorian wants to climb him like a fucking tree.

“Aw shit,” Bull says when they’re standing across from each other, a sheepish smile on his face. “We had the same idea.”

Dorian laughs, can do nothing else with the joy unfurling in his gut, and when Bull reaches up to cup his chin, he leans into the touch. And Bull stills, and his expression falls into confusion, and then surprise. “Dorian…”

He taps his thumb against the vitaar across Dorian’s cheek, and before he can assume the worst, Dorian says, “I’ve been increasing my immunity slowly and you’ve done a wretched job at paying attention. We weren’t _that_ covert.”

“You…” Bull is rarely struck dumb. Dorian savors the look of genuine surprise on his face, and he was wrong before — this is what will stay with him. “You guys…” His eye widens as he puts it together and he glances from Dorian to each of their boys. Something knots in Dorian’s chest, solid and heavy and _delighted_ to see Bull’s slow-spreading smile, the way his expression shifts from bemusement to open… he’s touched. “You did this?”

Dorian hears the unspoken _for me_ , and he covers Bull’s hand with one of his own.

“Aw shit,” Bull says again, and he drags the back of his other hand across his eye. Dorian knows then, with a surety, feels it in the core of his bones, that he will devote the rest of his life to ensuring the Iron Bull no longer is so taken by surprise by someone doing something for him.

Perhaps Josephine’s romantic gushing about marriage was right.

 

 

Later, while Bull’s hands roam over every painted inch of Dorian’s skin, Dorian manages to gasp out, “It wasn’t an entirely _selfless_ act,” and Bull’s rumbling laugh… that’s what Dorian will remember.

**Author's Note:**

> friiiick and then [Lindsay drew Dorian in his vitaar](http://chaoslindsay.tumblr.com/post/117907339419/so-amurderof-was-talking-about-writing-a-fic-where) AND I SUBSEQUENTLY DIED. look at how handsome and roguish he is. scream.
> 
> !!!!!!! And [Jay drew the handfasting](http://dinojay.tumblr.com/post/117944047410/go-read-ars-amatoria-cry-about-husbands) and hahaha I am dead, I am slain, there is no more of me left alive.
> 
> OH LORDY I AM VERKLEMPT [Bet drew the handfasting too](http://alphabetiful.tumblr.com/post/118315251569/everybody-go-read-amurderofs-wonderful-wonderful) and I am a wreck, I am destroyed, I am a mere shadow of myself because all of my feelings have poured out of me in a stream of adoribull tears.


End file.
